Monday, 12 February 2018

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.", wrote Isaac Newton in 1675. It wasn’t an original thought even at the time but as we reach the middle of this year’s LGBT History Month, and as some wonder what the need is for such an event, this quote seems particularly apt. Although, as in so many cases, evidence is scant, Newton seems likely to have been at least romantically attracted to men. A possible proclivity, which, like that of so many other prominent figures, is either not discussed or actively maintained in the recesses of the darkest closet by an interested or downright hostile society. Further than this, however, the quote epitomises the situation of any LGBT person living in the UK in 2018. It is a cliché but we do indeed stand on the shoulders of giants; people who have had the courage to speak out and push for laws and mentalities to change; for us to be in a position to live our lives more or less as we please (although, as research on bullying, homelessness and hate crimes show, too many of us are still not even able to do that).
Forgetting this is a betrayal of those courageous forebears (the Karl Heinrich Ulrichs or Marsha P. Johnsons of this world) and puts us on the road to forgetting that rights can be taken away much more easily than they are won. We only need to look at Bermuda, which just repealed its equal marriage legislation after only a year, and the pathetic lack of effective response from the Home Office, to know how true this is. However much we may protest otherwise from our privileged positions, vigilance is still key, and taking even a fleeting interest in our past can help us keep it alive. To many, history appears boring and irrelevant, but LGBT history is more than a list of meaningless dates. It is about the blood, sweat and tears of people like us. It tells us who we are, how we got there, and why we are we are. It certainly doesn’t have to be a miserable yawnfest in black and white, although there are sadly plenty of gloomy episodes in our collective, and often very recent, past. Look at the 18th century London Mollies, with their gender-bending, their mock marriages and birthings, or the thriving gay scene of the Weimar Republic, with its bars, social groups and magazines. Perhaps you’d prefer a look at the 70’s communes in Brixton with their radical theatre troupes? Our past shimmers with all the glittering colours of the rainbow, if you just care to look. Far from preventing any member of the community from being themselves, it is a way for us to learn about those role models we are never told about by the straight mainstream. Our straight brothers and sisters, by virtues of being members of the mainstream, are steeped in their own history. It is all around them and this allows them to build their sense of self as valued members of a group pretty much by osmosis. By our very nature, this is a luxury that we are not granted. Knowing our history provides the grounding to “see further” and be your best self, to be more creative and more at home within your own skin without having to achieve that result on your own. In the end, there is space for both learning about our past and enjoying a party. In fact, if we know about the challenges, the joys, the hardships and the achievements, aren’t we likely to want to enjoy ourselves with more defiant gusto and to appreciate the freedom to do so with added vigour? To paraphrase LGBT History Month's tag line: Celebrate your present, by all means, but do not forget to claim your past. It will help you create your future.

Monday, 9 October 2017

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from a free lance journalist working for BBC Three. He explained he was working on an article about the resurgence of the use of the term "androphile" among right-wing men as a way to distance themselves from the supposed lefty connotations of the word "gay". Something that was news to me.The journalist wanted to conduct a phone interview with me because somehow he'd found out that when I first created this blog (in 2004), I used the word "androphile" to describe myself. I should have known better, having been interviewed, before but I agreed to talk to him. When you read the result of an interview you find that the gist of what you said is indeed there but because of the need for pithyness and, possibly, a chinese-whispers effect, your words are also stripped of at least some of their nuance and somehow not fully representative of what you meant. Hence this post, I suppose.

You can read the results of the interview here. This has since then been picked up, retold, and further skewed, with disapproving undertones, by Queerty, Attitude, and possibly others. I've had few direct reactions so far and they have been benign, if somehow odd. Some indirect reactions on social media have been... a little less benign, shall we say, so this might change.

As far as I recall the right-hand side column of this page is the only place I have ever used the term and it hasn't featured there for some time. I have no idea how the journalist managed to track me down, as google doesn't appear to index me in association with the term.

This was a half-serious, admitedly slightly pompous way of trying to be both neutral and punctiliously precise in that description of myself to a new visitor of this blog. I somehow cobbled the word from my fragmentary knowledge of Greek and probable memories of encountering it somewhere before (I certainly don't claim to have had an original idea).

I felt "homosexual" often had a clinical connotation, while one possible definition of the word "gay" covers a range of interests that I didn't share: i.e. the stereotyplical, more frivolous side of gay culture of which I wasn't part of. Again it wasn't a rejection of this side of the culture, just a prosaic attempt at acknowledging that this wasn't part of my experience. I am simply, as I often joke, a bad gay.

As mentioned above, I have never really used the term other than in that profile and for simplicity's sake, I routinely and happily describe myself as "gay", since it's a short-hand that everybody will recognise and understand. And following the discovery that the word is now favoured by all sorts of (to my eyes) unsavoury characters, "gay" will certainly remain my descriptor of choice for the foreseeable future.

UPDATE: I think the journalist found me via my dormant MySpace (remember that?) accountw, the end of my short biog went: "I am androphile, AKA a big 'mo." I have now removed that bit.

Sunday, 3 September 2017

God's Own Country (GOC) has been garnering plaudits from critics and audiences alike. The gays on my TL who's seen it are raving about it. Yet on the face of it the film hardly seem material for success. It is a totally conventional romcom story (indeed it has been compared to another (Brokeback Mountain)): an interloper comes to rescue the main character from the doldrums. They don't like each other at the beginning but love triumphs in the end. The worth here is in the storytelling. The justness of the tone, full of delicate details but always successfully avoiding sentimentality, the sensitive portrayals of the characters, the raw, unflinching scenes, make GOC an out of the ordinary exploration of love and male identity. That the film is a gay love story is, I would argue, ultimately quite secondary, a narrative device almost, although to most viewers this will probably feel quite central. The facts that it is set in the dourness of the Yorkshire countryside, not in an urban environment, that it features (mostly) working class people and that one of those people is a Romanian immigrant seem much more significant in the end. It is worth noting that despite some rather vigorous sexual encounters of a homosexual nature and the passing display of male genitalia, the censors, in their wisdom, thought that all that was required was a 15 certificate. This is a sign of progress no doubt. Another sign of this, possibly, is that, had this story been told five to ten years ago, we would probably not have been granted the happy ending we now get and our heroes would not have been allowed to go roam the greenwood (as Forster called it in Maurice).Beyond the sweet love story, however GOC can, I think, be viewed as a portrayal of, and a metaphor for modern Britain. And it is fair to say that the DVD of GOC won't be on Farage's Christmas list. We are presented with an insular little group of people, stuck in a hopeless rut and deeply unhappy for it. They are facing emotional and financial ruin and they are, in the end, only saved by the arrival of a skilled worker from Romania and the upheaval it causes (that nationality can't have been chosen by chance after the scare stories published in the right-wing press not so long ago). In the context of the unfolding debacle that is the UK's decision to leave the EU and to cut itself from the rest of Europe, the plot of the film takes a highly symbolic meaning which turns into a deeply socially and politically engaged film, and this is what transcends its possible status as a modest romcom to being a true work of art.

Saturday, 22 July 2017

You'll have noticed them on a pavement or at a street corner in the past few days. There's a new set of players in town trying to lure you into taking them for a ride. They are wild and free; they don't need docking stations; the obikes are in town and they want your attentions.

Since I needed to pay Canada Water a visit, which is unhelpfully located outside the catchment zone of the TfL/Santander Cycle Hire scheme, I decided to take the opportunity to satisfy my curiosity by using one of those obikes to take myself there from Elephant and Castle.

A similar hire scheme, called Mokibes, recently opened in Manchester and there's apparently been what we shall modestly call a few teething problems. Even the London scheme, where people are invited to leave the bikes near an official bike parking location, seems to have created some confusion, as seen in the image below I shot earlier this week.

I should probably mention here that I am a great fan and have been a dedicated and almost daily user of the so-called Boris Bikes/Kenny Farthings since the inception of the scheme (seven years ago almost to the day). Since that time, those bikes have been my main means of transport and I love using them.

So, having downloaded the undispensable obike app earlier in the week to have a little snoop around, I was pretty much ready to go and see what the new kid on the block had to offer. The obvious advantage for me is the option (as per my planned trip) to go where the red bikes wouldn't take me.

Finding a bike (photo below) and unlocking it was pretty straight forward and all worked very well. The bikes are currently free to use (normal cost is 50p for 30min - much cheaper to casual users than the established scheme), with only a (reduced) deposit of £29 to pay in-app (full deposit will be £49).

This is however sadly pretty much where the fun stopped for me.

The bikes are much lighter than Cycle Hire ones and as such feel a little flimsy to someone used to the more sturdy option. I had to readjust the handle bars which had somehow been turned out of line with front wheel; something I never have to do normally.

As I do everytime I take a TfL bike, I had to adjust the seat height (I'm tall, you see). Unfortunately those bikes are not built for tall people. The seat stem is impossibly short and I ended up with my legs bent at 90 degree, when the recommended position is to be able to extend them fully for maximum power.

Still, I set off on what I had discovered earlier should be roughly a 15min ride to the east.

Unlike the older scheme, those bikes only have one speed (although that shouldn't be a problem for me as I only ever use the 3rd gear on the TfL bikes). Couple with the clumsy cycling position and some headwind, I often felt that I could have gone faster walking. I'm normally more or less able to keep up with slow traffic with the other scheme, which, I am convinced, affords me extra safety. Not being able to remotely keep up, is, I think, dangerous.

What I took to be an apparently ineffective gear twist (located on the right handle bar) is apparently in fact a bell, which already didn't work on my bike.

Very soon my legs started to ache in unusual places and to lose most stamina. I even had to resort several time to cycling standing, BMX style, for a little relief. I did manage to pick up a little speed when doing that, but it is not a position that can be kept for long.

In the end, I didn't even quite reach my planned destination before I decided to ditch the bike (in front of Canada Water's leisure centre) and finish my trip on foot. This had taken me 22 min according to the app and I was sweating like I haven't sweated for a very long time on one of my usual steeds.

There are a number of people who think the Santander bikes too ponderous and slow. Compared to the obikes, they are like the best-tuned racing machines and my love for them has only grown after today.

I am lucky enough to rarely have to go outside the cycle hire zone, so I would only have limited need for the obikes in the first place, but I will certainly do my utmost not to have to use them again. If I do end up using them, perhaps late at night in north-east London where I sometimes find myself, it will only be as far as the nearest docking station, where I'll quickly swap for one of the red bikes.

The app works fine, the availability is great but the scheme is totally being let down by the central piece of it, the bikes themselves. A real missed oppotunity.

Wednesday, 21 January 2015

Knowing that despite the staggering seven million copies printed, not everyone would have been able to see it, French blogger Antoine Léaument has kindly shared the editorial published by Charlie Hebdo in its issue following the terror attacks last week.

With a similar aim of getting as many people as possible to read the piece, I have produced a rough and ready English translation of said editorial that you can read below.

I attended two of the gatherings that took place in London (on 07th and 11th January) to show solidarity with the victims. My pictures of the events are here and here.

Will there still be "yes, buts"? Charlie Hebdo Editorial, No. 1178 of January 14, 2015

For
the past week, Charlie, an atheist newspaper, has performed more
miracles than all the saints and prophets combined. What we are most
proud of is that you have in your hands the paper we have always made in
the company of those who have always made it. What made us laugh the
most is that the bells of Notre Dame have rung in our honor ... For
the past week, Charlie worldwide has moved much more than mountains.
For the past week, as Willem has so beautifully drawn it, Charlie has
lots of new friends. Anonymous people and global celebrities, the humble
and the well-off, the disbelievers and the clerics, the sincere and
the Jesuits, some we will keep for life and some here only briefly.
Today we take them all, we do not have the time or the heart to sort
them out. But we are not fooled either. We thank with all our heart
those, in millions, whether private citizens or embodying institutions,
who are really on our side, who, sincerely and deeply, "are Charlie".
They know who they are. And fuck off to the others, who, in any case,
don't give a shit... One
question, though, torments us: are we finally going to get the
political and intellectual vocabulary rid of the dirty words
"fundamentalist secularist"? Are we finally going to stop inventing
scholarly semantic convolutions to similarly qualify the murderers and
their victims? In
recent years, we have felt a bit alone, trying to push back with pencil
strokes the direct crap and the pseudo intellectual niceties that have
been thrown in our faces, and the faces of those friends of ours who
strongly defended secularism: islamophobes, christianophobes,
provocaters, irresponsible people, throwers of oil on fire, racists,
you-got-it-coming ... Yes, we condemn terrorism but. Yes, threatening
cartoonists with death, it's not nice, but. Yes, burning down a
newspaper, it's wrong, but. We've heard everything, and so have our
friends. We have often tried to laugh at this, because this is what we
do best. But now we would like to laugh at something else. Because it
is already starting again. The blood of Cabu, Charb, Honoré, Tignous,
Wolinski, Elsa Cayat Bernard Maris, Mustapha Ourrad, Michel Renaud,
Franck Brinsolaro, Frédéric Boisseau, Ahmed Merabet, Clarissa
Jean-Philippe, Philip Braham, Yohan Cohen, Yoav Hattab, François
Michel Saada, had not yet dried that Thierry Meyssan explained to his
Facebook fans that it was obviously a Judeo-Americano-Western plot. We
could already hear here and there, delicate mouths pouting over the
last Sunday's rally, drooling from the corner of their lips the eternal
quibbles aimed at justifying, openly or quietly, terrorism and
religious fascism, and getting indignant, among other things, of
celebrations of the police = SS. No, in this massacre, there is no
death less unjust than others. Franck, who died on the premises of
Charlie, and his colleagues killed during this week's barbarism, died to
defend ideas that maybe were not even theirs.We
will still going to try to be optimistic, although it's not the season.
We will hope that, as of this January 7, 2015, the firm defense of
secularism will be obvious to everyone, people will finally stop, as
posturing, as electoral calculation or as cowardice, to legitimise or
even tolerate communitarianism and cultural relativism, which open the
way to one thing only: religious totalitarianism. Yes, the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a reality, yes, international
geopolitics are a succession of maneuverings and dirty tricks, yes, the
social situation of, as they call them, "populations of Muslim origin"
in France is deeply unfair, yes, racism and discrimination must be
fought relentlessly. Fortunately, there are several tools to address
these serious problems, but they are all ineffective if one is missing:
secularism. Not positive secularism, not inclusive secularism, not
secularism-I-don't-know-what: secularism, period. It alone allows,
because it advocates the universality of rights, the exercise of
equality, of liberty, of fraternity, of sorority. It alone allows full
freedom of conscience, a freedom that denies, more or less openly,
according to their PR positioning, all religions as soon as they leave
the field of strict privacy to descend unto the political field. It
alone allows, ironically, believers and non-believers, to live in peace.
All those who claim to defend Muslims by accepting the religious
totalitarian discourse are in fact defend the executioners. The first
victims of Islamic fascism are Muslims people. The
millions of anonymous people, all the institutions, all the heads of
state and government, all the political, intellectual and media
personalities, all the clerics who this week proclaimed "Je suis
Charlie" need to know that it means also "Je suis pour la laïcité/I am
for secularism." We are convinced that for the majority of our
supporters, this goes without saying. The others can fuck off.One
more thing, an important one. We would also like to send a message to
Pope Francis, who "est Charlie" also, this week: we only welcome the
bells of Notre Dame ringing in our honor when it is members of Femen
who make them resound.

Sunday, 21 September 2014

Due to a some problem when coming back from a trip to Paris on the Eurostar, I had been given 50% off on another trip and rather than returning to Paris, I thought I would use it to go to Brussels where I had never been.

I had been warned that Brussels is not a particularly pretty city. My expectations were therefore not very high, further dampened by the forecast of rain.

Thankfully that rain never materialised and I was lucky to have very sunny, unseasonably hot, weather. It seems however true that Bruxelles is not the best looking of cities. The commentary on the bus tours I took extolled the merits of the city as the once capital of the second richest empire on earth, now the modern international centre of the economic and political union of over 500 million people.

But, with the exceptions of a few pockets dispersed throughout the city centre, it lacks the grandeur you would expect from such a place. There seems to be many derelict buildings even in the very centre and it certainly lacks the thrusting energy of the buzzing capital it is supposed to be. Visually it seems that large sections of Brussels have been built at the turn of the 20th century, giving the visitor the feeling of being in the outskirts of Paris, alas forever unable to find the grand and elegant heart of the place.

For a photographer with little time get to know the city, the fairly limited number of "sights" turned out to be a positive thing as I think it allowed me to move away from shooting the obvious focal points more quickly, thus focusing on an hopefully more authentic vision of Brussels.

The population seemed incredibly diverse and much more intermixed than it is in London. Young men of north African origin are an ever present sight, even the more central areas or on the Metro, when ethnic minorities seem to remain confined to certain areas and mostly to the buses in London. The presence of beggars is also quite apparent in a way that it hasn't in London for some years now.

The gay scene, though I didn't particular seek it or even visited it, seems extensive for what is after all a fairly small city, and is quite prominently settled right in the centre of town.

Sadly I did not have the time to go to any museum or gallery, of which there seem to be an inordinately large selection, to a point that seems barely sustainable.

On the whole I enjoyed my stay and it's clear that I only scratched the surface of what is on offer but my myopic first impressions were in the end not positive enough for me to say that I will be back soon. Never say never, though.

Friday, 11 April 2014

I started writing this a question on the Facebook group of my photography group and it seemed to turned into something much longer, so I decided to post it here too.

Those of you based in the UK will probably have heard of the Women Who Eat on the Tube furore that's slowly leaked from social media into the mainstream news cycle. I think this raises some questions for those of us with an interest in street photography (whether just passing or more serious).

This morning the guy behind the idea was on Today defending his actions as an innocuous personal art project victim of its own success. The consensus among the critics seems to be that the whole thing is sexist and just another way for chauvinists to shame women.

Although I can see that specifically "targeting" women can be seen as a little suspicious, my understanding is that it was mostly the later (once the thing (started in 2011) got some traction) comments on those pictures that did the shaming.

But the criticism seem firmly directed at the project rather than the reactions it created in its intended audience. This leads me to question what is going on. Is there a legitimate concern or is it just another hysterical twitter storm? And what does it all mean for us photographers?

I fail to see what is shameful about the act of eating. The pictures were taken in a public space where they were therefore allowed and the "victims" remained anonymous. If WWEotT is reprehensible, shouldn't there have been an outcry when Tubecrush came to notoriety? Is there a double standard being applied here?

The critics also talk about breach of expected privacy, saying that people should be able to expect not to be photographed and have their image subsequently shared without consent. But that leads me to wonder what we should do with the images of famous street photographers, the Doisneaus and the Maiers of this world, who took (presumably) unauthorised shots of passers by which can now be easily seen be thousands (or more) people. Should their art be banned? Is their work more legitimate and acceptable because they are now recognised artists? what about emerging artists?

I realise that a group of mostly men is perhaps not the best place to discuss this but I think that, both as gay men (and a few women) and photographers, we have a stake in the debate and I would like to hear people's thoughts on this.

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